# This Week in Google Alerts: Armstrong

*The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 28 Jul 2014*

<https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/6583>

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### Gwern Branwen
*28 Jul 2014, 15:24*

- long TR interview already excerpted in separate thread:
http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/2014-July/054936.html
- http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/headline/2014/07/23/9bc1790e-061b-11e4-bbf1-cc51275e7f8f_story.html
book review, "_Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight_ by Jay Barbree", Lee
Billings:

> At one point in Gene Wolfe’s _Book of the New Sun_, a story set
> on a far-future Earth lapsed into a Dark Age, the narrator glimpses a
> “warrior of a dead world” in an enigmatic picture hanging in a dusty
> gallery. Clad in bulky white armor and a bubble-like helmet of
> polished gold, standing beside a stiff banner in a desolate gray
> wasteland, the “warrior” is actually an Apollo astronaut planting an
> American flag on the moon. For most of the inhabitants of Wolfe’s
> fallen world, the moon landings and the people who made them had
> become little more than a half-remembered fairy tale.
> 
> I recalled Wolfe’s scene while reading one of the final
> anecdotes in Jay Barbree’s admirably accessible new book, a biography
> of Neil Armstrong, who died at age 82 in 2012. At the conclusion of a
> global tour promoting space exploration, Armstrong, the first man on
> the moon, sits in a roadside diner with Gene Cernan, the last,
> chatting over coffee about when humans might at last return to the
> lunar surface, and how we might someday visit Mars. More than 40 years
> ago, their Apollo missions had captivated billions, but now Armstrong
> and Cernan were retired and relatively anonymous, pining for a future
> that had never fully arrived.
> 
> Like most people Armstrong and Cernan now encountered, the
> server refilling their cups had no idea that his customers were living
> bookends to what, even now, is our modern era’s most astounding
> adventure. Yet unlike in Wolfe’s tale, the moonwalkers? fade to
> near-myth has happened not over countless millennia, but in less than
> a half-century. Somehow, as Apollo and its astronauts have aged, its
> legacy has been perversely twisted, with human interplanetary voyaging
> now routinely depicted as just an old-fashioned eccentricity of the

Cold War rather than the existential imperative it truly is. ...
- http://apilgriminnarnia.com/2014/07/23/sham/ "The Sea a Sham Born of
Uniformity: On Subverting the Normal with Gene Wolfe
(#WritingWednesdays)":

> From a writer’s perspective and Wolfe’s story really is a kind
> of narrative writer’s workshop we can learn from his ability to
> disorient the reader. One can do that easily enough through strangers,
> dreams, foreign lands, or other dimensional realities; there are some
> brilliant examples of these in all of the best fantasy books. But
> Wolfe takes it a step further. He not only enhances the texture of his
> world by having readers discover its idiosyncrasies, but he also
> disorients the reader by having her discover mundane realities in her
> world in new and surprising ways.
> 
> The following excerpt is a great example of this subversion of
> the normal. The protagonist falls asleep beside a giant. In his sleep
> he mounts a leather-winged beast and explores the dying globe that he
> has been forced to wander. Watch the way that Wolfe inverts our
> expectations, speaking of the vision ahead as a “sham of uniformity”

and a “purple waste.” The Shadow of the Torturer is a narrative
reprimand to the writer prone to info dump, as well as a template for
the double inversion of the reader’s expectation in entering the
speculative universe:

> _The Shadow of the Torturer_, "Chapter 15: Baldanders": "And
> then I dreamed?.

```
gwern
http://www.gwern.net
```

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